Status update on 1.3

[Chris Travers <..hidden..>]

Hi all;

I wanted to update everyone on where we are with 1.3.

As many of you may know LedgerSMB 1.3 involves major rewrites of a number of parts of the program, including customer, vendor, employee, user, reconciliation, and payment handling.  We have seen strong benefits in scalability and such.

At the moment we are waiting on a couple of patches from folks outside the committer community and will declare a feature freeze when these patches are in.  These are patches which complete current features which are already closely tied with other parts of the program.  Prior to beta 1, we also have some other bugs that need to be fixed.

I expect to be in feature freeze no later than the end of the month, with beta 1 following within 1-2 weeks of feature freeze.

Here is a changelog which is probably incomplete.  However it gives you an idea of what to expect in 1.3.

Changelog for LedgerSMB 1.3.0

Security:
* Security is now robustly enforced on the db level (Chris T and Josh D)
* New user interface to manage users (Chris T and Aurynn)

Separation of Duties:
* Separate permissions for entry and posting to the books.
* Voucher/Batch system (Chris T)
* Draft system for unapproved transactions (Chris T)
* Reconciliation is now subject to separation of duties (Chris T and Aurynn)

End of Year:
* Close books and end of year transactions at once (Chris T and Aurynn)
* Cannot close books where unapproved transactions are before yearend(Chris T)
* Yearend/closed books now creates balance checkpoints for better performance
(Chris T and Aurynn)

General Ledger/Journal:
* GL reports filter by account (Chris T)
* GL reports account is ajax-style autocomplete (John W)
* Journal Entry screen now uses AJAX-style autocomplete for accounts (Chris T)
* GL reference now populated by default in the initial screen (Chris T).

Reconciliation:
* Reconciliation is no new codebase!
* Redesigned workflow (Chris T and Aurynn)
* Optimized for high volumes (1000 transactions or more per run, Chris T)
* Plug in model for bank import scripts (Chris T and Aurynn)

Payments:
* Payments are on new codebase!
* Redesigned bulk payment workflow/UI (Chris T)
* Bulk payment optimizations for high volumes (5000 invoices per run, Chris T)
* Redesigned single payment workfow/UI (David M)

Contact Handling:
* Contacts are now on new code base!
* Customers/Vendors Now Can Be Tracked Together (Josh D, Chris T, Aurynn)
* Multiple addresses and contact info stored per account (Josh D and Chris T)
* Multiple read-only notes per account (Josh D, Chris T, and Lacey P)
* Multiple bank accounts per customer/vendor account (Josh D and Chris T)
* Track 1099 or equiv. forms for customers/vendors (Chris T and John W)

Development:
* New API structure for new code (Entire Team)
* Better error handling/display (Jason and Chris T)
* Errors logged to httpd error log (Chris T)
* Cleaned up file structure for charts of accounts (Chris T)
* New UI and template system using TT (Seneca)
* Form.pm deprecated.  New Object Oriented and data-driven model (Chris T)
* Added ledgersmb-smallgray.css (Jeff K)
* Stored procedure-based ORM for data model encapsulation in db (ChrisT)
* Many small forms moved to templates (Seneca)

Misc:
* Timecard lists project descriptions as well as numbers (Chris T)
* Invoices can now be put on hold (Aurynn)
* New CLI database creation routines  (Jeff K)
* New web-based db creation routines (Sadashiva A)

Database:
* Redesigned database schema for contacts (Josh D)
* Redesigned database schema for chart of accounts (Chris T)
* Redesigned database schema for reconciliation (Aurynn and Chris T)
* Redesigned database schema for payments (David M)